On Sunday night, we will (or will not) have some new Hall of Famers. We probably will, given the results of the recent deliberations of the current version of the Hall's veterans committee. Those folks* will convene in San Diego this weekend, and they've got some serious work to do -- debating this year's 10-person ballot for possible inclusion among baseball's immortals.
(*Per the Hall of Fame: "The 16-member Hall of Fame Board-appointed electorate charged with the review of the Modern Baseball Era features Hall of Fame members George Brett, Rod Carew, Dennis Eckersley, Eddie Murray, Ozzie Smith and Robin Yount; major league executives Sandy Alderson, Dave Dombrowski, David Glass, Walt Jocketty, Doug Melvin and Terry Ryan; and veteran media members/historians Bill Center, Steve Hirdt, Jack O'Connell and Tracy Ringolsby.")
I follow a dizzying number of online forums where good Hall debates take place, though I am what the internet calls a "lurker." If you don't know what that means in an internet context, that means I read the debate but I don't participate. Sometimes it's hard to remain aloof. But one thing I've picked up since last year's selection of Harold Baines and Lee Smith, historically inclined fans are on the lookout for personal connections on the Hall committee. (Which, by the way, is a different group than the one that selected the 10 names for consideration.) That's why I listed this year's selectors.
The era up for examination this year is the "Modern Baseball" time frame, which includes those whose primary contributions fell in the range of 1970 to 1987. For Gen-Xers who peaked early, this might include you. But the names that the selecting committee landed on include nine players (Dwight Evans, Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Don Mattingly, Thurman Munson, Dale Murphy, Dave Parker, Ted Simmons and Lou Whitaker) plus the revolutionary head of the MLB Players Association, Marvin Miller. Each committee member can list up to four names on his or her ballot, but doesn't have to list any. Any person who is named on at least 12 of the 16 ballots will punch his ticket to Cooperstown.
Miller's candidacy is so far divorced from the others that I'll begin with him. His contributions to the game can't be expressed in terms of WAR or win probability added. He logged zero at-bats and never pitched to a hitter. His athletic prowess consisted of a dogged interest in recreational tennis. Nevertheless, Miller is the clearest Hall of Famer on the ballot, and it's kind of shameful that he wasn't selected long ago, though we understand why that happened. (Pettiness.)
Those who butted heads with Miller during his time with the MLBPA have mostly moved on from baseball, if not from the ranks of the living altogether. Miller himself died in 2012 and was steadfast that he wanted no part of being enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Sorry about this Marvin, but my feeling is that the Hall is only partially for those who are honored; it's mostly there for anyone who wants to know and understand our great game. And we can do neither without learning Miller's story and appreciating his unparalleled contributions to baseball. Whether you like those contributions is up to you, but you can't deny them or the fact that baseball was fundamentally altered by Miller's existence.
Here's a list of everyone in Cooperstown with the catch-all tag of "executive," according to the Hall: Ed Barrow, Alexander Cartwright, Henry Chadwick, Happy Chandler, Morgan Bulkeley, Charles Comiskey, Candy Cummings, Barney Dreyfuss, Ford Frick, Warren Giles, Pat Gillick, Clark Griffith, Will Harridge, William Hulbert, Ban Johnson, Bowie Kuhn, Kenesaw Landis, Larry MacPhail, Lee MacPhail, Effa Manley, Walter O'Malley, Alex Pompez, Cumberland Posey, Branch Rickey, Jacob Ruppert, John Schuerholz, Bud Selig, Al Spalding, Bill Veeck, George Weiss, Sol White, J.L. Wilkinson, George Wright, Harry Wright, Tom Yawkey.
There are a million stories in that list of names. There are some great feats and innovations, and some behavior that warrants severe rebuke. Nowhere is the labor side of the timeless owner-player tug of war represented, and that is a glaring omission. If you want to maintain that only on-field personnel should be recognized, that's a reasonable point of view. That means none of those names listed in the previous paragraph would be in the Hall of Fame. But if contributors beyond on-field action are to be acknowledged, Miller has to be in the group.
So that puts one name on my ballot, meaning I only have room for three more. But, again, I don't have to include any of the players if they don't meet my standards. Well, I've written about this a few times now, but as things have evolved, I have a fairly good idea of where my line is drawn. Basically, I think that, roughly speaking, the top three percent of eligible candidates should probably get in -- by some measure. The top one percent are the inner circle types, surrounded by the next percentile of no-brainers. It's in the third, fourth and fifth percentiles that the fun begins.
But how do we assign a player to a percentile tier? By a statistic? By a group of statistics? By the eye test? By career value? By peak value? It's all on the table. My criteria is that if a player looks Hall worthy by career value or by his performance over any 10-year period -- or both -- he should get in. The 10-year part is where I landed after considering the most basic criteria of Hall eligibility -- that a player lasted at least 10 seasons in the bigs.
As for the "some measure" aspect, that's where it gets tricky and is where I am still evolving. There's no one number I rely on, though I'm going to refer to the FanGraphs' version of WAR to put some numbers to my rankings. When comparing careers, I look at the different versions of WAR, as well as win probability indicators, win shares and other criteria, like awards voting, postseason performance and such. I especially try to zero in on defensive performance, because I'm distrustful on how it's handled in the leading versions of WAR. It's all about trying to determine if a player is in the top three percentile of his era, or thereabouts, at his particular position. The number is just a guideline and should not be treated too rigidly.
That brings us to our current list of nine players. None of the nine are a slam dunk via the 10-year test when compared to the entire population of Hall eligible players. The highest 10-year percentile among them belongs to Simmons, whose best decade landed him in the 95th percentile all time according to fWAR. Whitaker, Murphy, Evans and John are all in the 92nd percentile or better based on their best 10-year span. On the career path side of things, three players are there, or almost there: John (98th percentile), Whitaker (97th) and Evans (96th), while Simmons is in the 93rd percentile.
While I see the Hall road as being forked -- 10-year excellence being one path and career compilation being the other -- we can look at those paths in unison. In that vein, you will notice that John, Simmons, Whitaker and Evans show up on both paths. As you might guess, I would lean toward filling in all three of my remaining ballot slots under Miller with some combination of those four players.
But someone has to go and for me, that player is John. I know he's a pioneer because of the surgery that bears his name, and you might have noticed the name of Candy Cummings on the list of "executives" in the Hall. Well, Cummings was a pitcher, not so much a power broker, but he's credited with inventing the curveball, a pitch that likely later broke countless elbow ligaments in the decades to come, at least until John and Dr. Frank Jobe came along in the 1970s. So John is both a pioneer and a player who has very solid on-field credentials. I'd be fine with him getting in ... but maybe next time this era is looked at.
For me, Simmons is the biggest Hall omission among catchers, and the position is underrepresented as it is. Whitaker doesn't hold that title among second basemen, but he's damn close. (I'd go with Bobby Grich before him, but he's not on the ballot.) And Evans is one of the most unappreciated players of all time, period.
That's my ballot: Marvin Miller, Ted Simmons, Lou Whitaker and Dwight Evans. If all four get in to keep Derek Jeter company next July in Cooperstown, that would be fine with me. Hopefully, the 16 voters can come to a similar conclusion this weekend.
Extra innings
1. The non-tender deadline in baseball used to be more or less a non-event on the calendar, but the past couple of years, good players increasingly have been set adrift so that their former teams can avoid arbitration-fueled raises. Some of those players end up re-upping with their old teams under employer-friendly terms, others hit the free-agent market and still others end up getting traded. One who had that last outcome was a stunner: Baltimore's Jonathan Villar.
Villar was a four-win player in 2019 for an Orioles team that lost 108 games. After a career-type season, MLB Trade Rumors estimated he'd get a pay increase to $10.4 million, a insignificant figure for a team that, per Cot's Contracts, has a projected 2020 payroll of around $78 million. And the unfortunate thing about it is that Orioles GM Mike Elias wasn't wrong to ship Villar to Miami for a fringe pitching prospect. It's the way the system is set up -- to reward and even encourage failure.
The Villar news stirred some renewed calls for a salary floor for teams in baseball. The conversation is worth having, but only as a subset of the many structural changes in the industry that are currently in the ether among MLB, the MLBPA, minor league baseball and, most importantly, the fans of the sport.
Here's the thing about a salary floor: These things have to be negotiated, and through that lens, you really can't have a salary floor without a salary cap. A floor would be based on some kind of fixed percentage of revenue, as it is in the NBA, but if you are going to compel the teams to spend at a minimum level, then the teams are going to insist on a firmer control on the upper end of the salary scale.
I'm not referring to the controls in place now in the form of the competitive balance tax system. And even that arrangement, as we've seen, has had a profound effect on how baseball's high-revenue teams operate, which affects the free-agent market as a whole. Still, the system implicitly targets high-revenue clubs; most teams have not built payrolls that even approach the lowest tax threshold. To calculate a floor based on that figure wouldn't work -- unless teams made the highly unlikely decision to move to full-on revenue sharing in the mode of the NFL.
From my standpoint, I'm not opposed to such a system, one where owners and players agree how much of the bounty will go to labor in the form of a negotiated fixed percentage. That's what happens in the other major American sports. The set-up doesn't end labor discord, and it sure as heck doesn't ensure competitive balance -- some of the NBA's most historically inept teams have been formed with the salary floor in place.
The next couple of years will be ripe with debate about these matters, which all fall under the umbrella of how rich people divide up a $10 billion pie. For now, given this week's events, let's at least acknowledge that whatever the system looks like 10, 20 or 30 years from now, we need to eliminate the incentive for teams to cut loose productive, in-prime performers like Villar. Doing so sends a clear message to fans of a team -- and it's not a good one: Wins, for now, don't matter.
2. Just some numbers, all culled in the wake of the sign-stealing scandal that has plagued baseball's offseason. My motivation for looking at these numbers was simply this: If the stealing of signs by a runner on second base -- a practice deemed as acceptable -- was both widespread and useful, would some kind of effect jump out in situational splits? The answer, based on a superficial reading of the data, is not really.
Since 2009, which is how far back advanced data from TruMedia goes, MLB hitters have hit a composite .730 in terms of OPS. That's your baseline. They've hit .715 with the bases empty and .750 with runners on base. The split is expected -- we've long known that hitters have an edge with runners on, when pitchers go from the stretch, are forced to work more in the strike zone and generally become more fastball reliant.
Zeroing in on the runners-on scenarios:
-- Runner on first base only: .745
-- Runner on second base only: .738
-- Runner on third base only: .780
-- Runners on first and second: .713
-- Runners on second and third: .798
-- Runners on corners: .783
-- Bases loaded: .745
It is interesting that batters have been better with a runner on second only than they are with the bases empty (.738 OPS vs. .715). The infield should be playing at normal depth, though they might not have their full array of shift options. First base is open, so the pitcher has a base to work with. And there will be some hitters willing to give themselves up to move the runner to third, depending on the game situation, which would drive down OPS in that situation. Yet for whatever reason, hitters' productivity is better with a teammate at second base as opposed when there's no one on. Maybe it's starters going from the stretch; maybe it's hitters looking to make contact as opposed to going deep.
We could dive deeper into score and out scenarios, and also look at year-over-year trends, but this approach is not likely to tell us anything overly revealing about sign chicanery. Any sign-stealing effect, if it exists in these data, is subsumed by numerous other things -- batters playing to move the runner on second over, the prevalence of double-play opportunities and whether the opposition is playing the infield in. Still, it's worth looking into. One would think there is a reason behind all of this kerfuffle, even if it is all part of the baseball gumbo.
3. About that non-tender stuff: You really could piece together a viable big-league roster from the players who were non-tendered, especially if the high number of bounce-back candidates among them were to actually bounce back.
To illustrate this, let's include players who technically weren't non-tendered but were traded to avoid arbitration pay hikes, like Villar. Here's one 26-man roster you could put together, with a 13-pitcher max:
Regulars: C.J. Cron (1B); Jonathan Villar (2B); Maikel Franco (3B); Addison Russell (SS); Josh Phegley (C); Domingo Santana (LF); Tim Beckham (CF); Steven Souza Jr. (RF); Jurickson Profar (DH).
Bench: Cesar Hernandez (IF); Yolmer Sanchez (IF); Elias Diaz (C); Guillermo Heredia (OF).
Rotation: Aaron Sanchez; Taijuan Walker; Jharel Cotton; Dario Agrazal; Javy Guerra.
Bullpen: Blake Treinen (closer), Trevor Hildenberger, Danny Hultzen, Josh Osich, Jason Adam, Derek Law, Ryan Buchter, James Hoyt.
I mean ... it's not great. But it (maybe) wouldn't be the worst team in the league. I've cheated in a couple of ways by making Beckham a center fielder and ignoring the issues for players (ahem, Aaron Sanchez) who may not actually be able to play in 2020 because of injury.
Let's ignore the cheats for now and assign projections to these players based on their pre-2019 standing. In other words, for most of them, the 2019 season was not good news. That's how they ended up on this roster. But before that, they had reasonably useful baselines. That's why they got the chance to fail and thus have now become bounce-back candidates.
Using the Steamer preseason forecasts from last spring, this roster projects for a combined 23 WAR. Add in replacement level wins, and you've got a 75-win team, give or take. Sure, this is a ham-handed way of calculating that, but you (hopefully) get the point: Some of this year's non-tenders will contribute to winning teams in 2020.